Graphic designers and other artists increasingly use digital graphic editing software to create and modify digital illustrations. For example, popular digital graphic editing software, such as Adobe Illustrator, enable artists to create and integrate their digital illustrations with other designs. When using digital graphic editing software, artists commonly create digital illustrations in vector-file formats to facilitate editing such digital illustrations. Some such vector-file formats include AI, SVG, or EPS file formats. After editing a digital illustration, artists often use digital graphic editing software to rasterize digital illustrations into a raster file format, such as JPG, PNG, or BMP file formats.
Regardless of the rasterized format, artists seek to adjust the settings and otherwise modify digital illustrations to produce a crisp illustration. A crisp digital illustration aligns the line segments of the digital illustration with a pixel grid. But a digital illustration may blur when the illustration's line segments misalign with the pixel grid. In other words, the pixels within a digital illustration's line segments may seep outside of a crisp boundary and cause the edges of a digital illustration to appear blurry.
Conventional digital graphic editing software include editing tools intended to sharpen the appearance of blurry digital illustrations. Unfortunately, conventional editing tools have proven inaccurate, inflexible, and/or tedious. In conventional digital graphic editing software, for example, cursors may manipulate one edge or one pixel of a digital illustration under the manual control of a user. But such edge-by-edge or pixel-by-pixel manipulation can prove tedious, produce an asymmetric illustration, and inhibit artists from fixing a blurry illustration.
In addition to such editing tools, some digital graphic editing software uses a naïve-pixel-grid method to align a digital illustration to conform to a pixel grid. By automatically conforming a digital illustration to a pixel grid, the naïve-pixel-grid method sometimes (and unintentionally) blurs a previously crisp-looking digital illustration. Although the naïve-pixel-grid method aligns a digital illustration's blurry edges with a pixel grid, it leaves the digital illustration's edges blurry and cannot adjust the clarity of an individual edge.
In addition to the naïve-pixel-grid method, some digital graphic editing software uses an align-to-pixel-grid method to modify blurry digital illustrations. But the align-to-pixel-grid method attempts to adjust a digital illustration in response to every user operation and, consequently, gradually distorts geometric shapes by altering the dimensions of a digital illustration. In addition to the gradual distortion, the align-to-pixel-grid method adjusts the dimensions of a digital illustration in a randomly chosen direction without user control or input. Because of the align-to-pixel-grid method's distorting effects, some digital illustrators have disabled the align-to-pixel-grid method by default when artists edit rectangular, elliptical, rounded rectangular, or polygonal shapes.
In sum, existing digital illustrators apply editing tools that have proven inaccurate, inflexible, and tedious, among other disadvantages, and thus inhibit sharpening the appearance of blurry digital illustrations in an efficient and aesthetically pleasing manner.